Request Tags

Here's what to do if you need tags.

Tagging season begins August 1, but we also have special programs to monitor breeding monarchs
and overwintering monarchs.

We provide free tags to citizen scientists tagging wild monarchs in the southwestern United States.
Our tagging area includes Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico, western Colorado and the California deserts.

If you're interested in participating, please contact us by email at the address below with the following information:

How many tags you will use.

Your mailing address.

Your phone number--if any of your tags are recovered, we will contact you first.

By requesting tags from Southwest Monarch Study, you agree to these terms:

You will not give tags to anyone else. (This has happened in the past. It gets really confusing.)
If someone asks you for tags, please have them contact us directly.

You will send us data reporting the monarchs you have tagged in a timely fashion (see below)

You will not provide your tagging data to anyone outside of Southwest Monarch Study.
(This has happened, too. In order for your tagging effort to be part of our study, we need to gather additional data from
people who may sight your tagged monarch. If anyone contacts you, please notify us immediately and tell them to contact us
directly.)

Please take a few minutes to review our newly updated Tagging Monarchs and let us know if you have any
questions.

Submitting Data

Please submit your data frequently as you tag. We need it to contact you when someone reports your tagged monarch.
There are two ways to do this:

Email us a completed excel spreadsheet. Use one of these so we can merge it into our master database.

If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can use Nature Digger's Monarch SOS free app. It is easy to use. Look for
Monarch SOS to be available soon for Androids.

We Are Blue!

Starting with its inception in 2003, the Southwest Monarch Study used blue tags. We switched to
white tags from 2012 to 2014 to help with recoveries in Mexico. In 2015 we returned to blue tags.
Sometimes a tagged monarch is seen at a great distance so the number cannot be read. When this happens,
we can tell it's a Southwest Monarch Study tag by its blue color.